You can now tag your comic! Tags will help people find your comic when searching and will play a role in the upcoming site redesign. Tags will be replacing our style/genre/format categorization system, so keep that in mind when choosing your tags, you may want to include some of your old categorical choices as tags.

The tags won't actually affect the search results yet as the search system is also in the process of being overhauled, but you can set your comic's tags now if you'd like.

2)Cover Images

Cover images will be replacing banners in the redesign. Cover images represent the cover of a print comic, and on Smack Jeeves will be sized 3:4 (width:height).

Here's an example of an image that works quite nicely as a Cover Image from The Evil Queen:

The recommended upload size is 1392x1856px so we can resize it down for the multiple size formats used in the redesign. These will be sized down to ~120x160px at the smallest, but will generally display at 228x308px.

As with tags, these won't be visible anywhere yet, but feel free to upload a cover image now so it will be ready when the redesign launches (hopefully some time next month).

oh man, the tags will be awesome! really nice addition to searching for comics and keeping stuff organized.

i dont get how the cover images will work, though. is it like a hover over deal where you hover over a comic and it shows the cover or will it just appear with the comic like banners do now? and as for the banners removal i feel like that would be a bad idea because currently the small banners look nice with the site design and make more comics able to be shown on the front page, but that's just me. however, if the site is getting a full redesign i guess it wont matter.

The covers will replace banners. The site is getting a full redesign based around covers.

As much as I dislike making covers for my comics, I'm looking forward to this change. Covers can be much more informative than banners. Also, I'm guessing animated covers will not be allowed? Really looking forward to that, if so.

I assume the site will auto-crop covers that have proportions that are a bit off? 3:4 is close to a lot of standards, but isn't standard.

Edit: I'm really looking forward to seeing what conventions form around the tags here. For example, will people tag long-form webcomics as all, or will those end up being the default with only gag-a-day comics being tagged instead? Will abbreviations like "B&W" be favoured for easy typing, or will people prefer reading clarity with fully written out tags?

Edit 2: After I entered my tags and went back to the edit profile page, they were re-ordered, but not in any sensible way. If the original tag order cannot be preserved, I recommend sorting them alphabetically (or eventually, by popularity) instead of using the DB order.

Will the site layouts themselves be changed as well? For example, the default "template" that most comics use shows the comic's banner in it - will that be replaced with the Cover Image, or will we be getting an entirely new set of site layouts to work with to accommodate the change?

(Because I can see the cover image's size being a bit obnoxious when it comes to trying to read through the archives of a comic if it's just replacing the comic banner - the difference between this and this, although with less "I obviously just changed the height value with Chrome's Inspect Element" image stretch.)

I can (sort of) visualize how this'll look on the Site Profile aspect of things, but the Site Layout itself has several pre-made templates that incorporate the comic banner into it that have me confused on how this is going to be implemented.

Shard wrote:Will the site layouts themselves be changed as well? For example, the default "template" that most comics use shows the comic's banner in it - will that be replaced with the Cover Image, or will we be getting an entirely new set of site layouts to work with to accommodate the change?

(Because I can see the cover image's size being a bit obnoxious when it comes to trying to read through the archives of a comic if it's just replacing the comic banner - the difference between this and this, although with less "I obviously just changed the height value with Chrome's Inspect Element" image stretch.)

I can (sort of) visualize how this'll look on the Site Profile aspect of things, but the Site Layout itself has several pre-made templates that incorporate the comic banner into it that have me confused on how this is going to be implemented.

This is a concern I have too. Admin has put out a call for designers for new templates so new templates that don't use the banners are definitely in the works, but I wonder how that'll affect existing templates. I think it's safe to say that anyone using a custom template will be responsible for updating their own stuff, but I do hope that SJ will update the old templates to at least not use the main-site banner. An alternative is that the old banner images could be left up and available for legacy use, but that people wouldn't be able to upload new ones.

I wonder about the possibility of keeping the "upload banner" option available for that purpose, and also for other reasons- banners are popular in link exchanges, sigs like we have here on the forums, and other purposes on the web. There's nothing to stop one from using imgur or whatever for that purpose but I valued having it as a part of the site profile setup section here.

oly: we draw stories about imaginary peopleDo not feet infants to honey under one year of age.me: Posh, Baby, Sporty, and Scary Hamrobybang: Together they're Spiced Ham

From what I gather, it is the main Smack Jeeves site that will receive a face lift while existing individual comic sites will be kept intact? Should I worry myself with backing up everything? (though I can't see anyone diligently typing every single line of CSS/HTML without the help of software like Notepad++ - hence already having everything safely stored away)Also, really enjoying the updated stats thus far (and seeing how deep my comic is buried in oblivion). Thanks, Admin!

chicken-blast wrote:From what I gather, it is the main Smack Jeeves site that will receive a face lift while existing individual comic sites will be kept intact? Should I worry myself with backing up everything? (though I can't see anyone diligently typing every single line of CSS/HTML without the help of software like Notepad++ - hence already having everything safely stored away)Also, really enjoying the updated stats thus far (and seeing how deep my comic is buried in oblivion). Thanks, Admin!

It will just be the main site. Some of the current default templates will be going away too, but I think comics using those will get to keep them, they'll just act as custom code.You may want to save your comic banner if you plan to use that elsewhere, though!